Thursday, 12 January 2012

Sketchbook: English National Ballet

Charley Peters, Drawing: English National Ballet (2012), Pencil on Paper

Today I was privileged enough to have access to draw dancers from the English National Ballet rehearsing for the production of Strictly Gershwin at the Coliseum Theatre, London. During their daily class I recorded the movement of the dancers, focusing on the space inhabited on the stage by both individual members of the company and also groups of dancers moving in harmony. At times the drawings concentrated on expressing the movements of the dancers' arms or feet during their warm up exercises and other pieces plotted the dancers as they traversed the stage, using the pages of my sketchbook to visually locate the dancers. The drawing process necessitated me to look at the dancers at all times, rather than the paper, and the drawings were revealed as finished sketches at the end of each exercise or rehearsed excerpt from the production. Each drawing lasted for the same duration as a particular exercise or sequence of movements. Some examples of the drawings produced today are below.

Charley Peters, Drawings: English National Ballet (2012), Pencil on Paper

1 comment:

Hi, I'm Ana. I really enjoyed looking at these drawings.The fact that they don't describe the human body (at least literally, figuratively)but they describe the movement and repetition in a fragmented sort of blurry way.

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Charley Peters’ work employs a rational methodology of drawing and painting to generate work with a refined, reductive aesthetic. Interested in the point of collapse between two and three dimensions, her practice examines notions of folded space and visual construction. Using systematic and logical approaches such as repetition, perspective, mathematical patterns and geometry, her work explores the interruption of the two dimensional plane and the manifestation of flatness in three dimensions. Peters’ work is precisely executed, concealing the artist’s hand in its production. Her work can be positioned within a discourse about the condition of painting in a post-digital landscape, exploring the material experience of paint in the age of the screen and the role of analogue programming to generate painted form.

Peters is a contributor to Abstract Critical's monthly blog AbCrit and writes regularly for Saturation Point, the online editorial project for reductive, geometric and systems art in the UK. With artists Patrick Morrissey and Hanz Hancock Peters works as part of the curatorial group Saturation Point Projects who organise exhibitions and events to raise the profile of reductive, geometric and systems-based art practices.

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The art works of Charley Peters and the images of works shown on this blog are the subject of copyright. The copyright of works remains with the artist and any use of an image of a work is subject to agreement with the artist. You should not reproduce any image without the explicit prior written consent of the artist.